The 3.03 release is in Apple’s hands

The 3.03 release was submitted to Apple earlier this week. There are a few notable enhancements:

1) A new app icon. I created a new hand-drawn icon for the app which is simpler and clean looking. You’ll see a green icon with a white CCTV camera from 3.03 on.

2) The ability to skip auto-updates and eliminate public cameras. If you are a private camera owner then these options are for you! The search/recent/random options go away and you are not going to have to wait during startup for the app to look for new data.

3) The auto-update performance is much improved. I have managed to crunch the camera data to a quarter of the size that it used to be, which results in a fairly quick download and update. The error-handling is now much improved as well and there should be no risk of download failures resulting in lost camera data.

4) Toolbar icons can be hidden or restored by a single tap on the video screen. This was a feature that was removed earlier but at the request of many users it has been reintroduced. Full screen video is still king! Double-tap to return to thumbnails has also been restored since the toolbars may be hidden when you want to leave the screen.

5) Warning messages are gone. When transitioning from Wifi to 3G or vice versa there will be a silent mode change in the engine and no alert boxes will be displayed. This is what the old engine did and I felt that too many people were questioning the slowdown on 3G networks. The messages were mis-interpreted by many people as some sort of feature loss in the last release. Nothing changed in how Live Cams fetches video at all, so the concerns were unfounded. Apple has always enforced a 1mb/min download limit on cell networks (for every app in the store). Bad reviews about “crippled software” are unfair and unjust because the feature is identical to the 1.0 release in January of 2009.

That’s all for now. There are a bunch of camera-specific fixes like Pixord MJPEG, IVC Relay Server support and more, but the biggest enhancements are mentioned above.